By BRIAN NEARING Staff writer

Published 1:00 am, Sunday, August 23, 2009

COHOES — Fueled white-hot by an ever-changing mix of industrial waste, two massive kilns at Norlite Corp. spin slowly as they turn rock into construction material.

For 47 years, Sylvia Sokol has lived on Edsel Place across from the Route 32 plant and its twin smokestacks. "In the winter, the snow will sometimes turn black," she said. "It's usually at night that they burn the worst stuff."

Many people in the blue-collar neighborhood have been worried ever since hazardous waste-burning started at the kilns in 1977. Residents of a Cohoes public housing project next to the plant said strange odors and plumes are routine.

"The smells are like chlorine, or like sulfur," said Saratoga Sites resident Anthony Smith. "It's usually worse at night, and when I first wake up in the morning."

But two years of records from the state Department of Environmental Conservation show potentially disturbing trends stemming from the unstable and erratic hodgepodge of waste being burned, which includes PCBs and a host of dangerous chemicals.

And while company officials won't say how much money the plant derives from burning waste, an analysis based on EPA records and average incineration rates suggest that the Norlite could be taking in $17 million a year or more, or nearly $180 million since 2000.

Like a car engine that sputters on dirty gasoline, the 54-year-old kilns' emissions have frequently been bumping up against pollution control limits, forcing Norlite to temporarily switch to cleaner-burning oil or natural gas before waste burning resumes.

From January through April, a Times Union analysis found, Norlite experienced 43 episodes in which carbon monoxide (CO) emissions exceeded federal safety limits of 100 parts per million. There were 17 similar episodes in 2008, and 16 in 2007.

Rising carbon monoxide indicates incomplete combustion of waste, according to outside experts who reviewed DEC's reports for the newspaper. The experts also raised concerns about another trend at Norlite: increasing emissions of hydrochloric acid, a form of the chemical chlorine.

Taken together, incomplete combustion and the presence of chlorine can be a red flag for the possible formation of dioxin, a known carcinogen that was the principal ingredient of the Vietnam War-era defoliant Agent Orange.

DEC regulators have taken notice. On June 15 — about a month after the Times Union sought Norlite's records — the department slapped Norlite with 62 violations under the U.S. Clean Air Act for unsafe CO emissions between November and April.

More enforcement is coming, according to DEC Region IV officials in Rotterdam, who declined to be interviewed for this story and would only respond in writing to written questions. DEC declined to say how Norlite's problems may be adding to pollution, writing "any potential impacts are the subject of an ongoing enforcement action."

The violations were called "serious" by Paul Connett, a chemistry professor at St. Lawrence University who studies incineration and dioxin. "When CO levels are high, it indicates that the plant is emitting higher-than-normal levels of products of incomplete combustion," he said. "These can be very toxic and carcinogenic."

In July 2007, DEC gave Norlite permission to burn more chlorinated waste. The plant's chlorine emissions — which the state reports jumped 40 percent between 2004 and 2008 — are "being reviewed at this time to determine the cause," according to DEC.

Lachell, the plant manager, said the CO spikes and rising chlorine have no effect on plant emissions. "Our stacks are cleaner than your tailpipe," he said.

The 250-acre Norlite plant is one of only two kilns in the country that make construction materials, known as aggregate, by burning hazardous waste, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 2007, the plant accounted for more than 70 percent of all hazardous waste burned statewide, according to EPA.

Since 1995, Norlite has been owned by Meriden, Conn.-based United Oil Recovery, a privately held corporation that also owns seven hazardous waste collection centers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Norlite is paid by industrial customers from as far away as Ohio, Maine, Maryland and Delaware that truck in waste, which is pumped into storage tanks. Lachell said technicians test waste for its chemical composition, then blend waste for maximum combustion potential before sending it through pipes to the kilns' burners.

Because Norlite gets paid to accept hazardous waste as fuel rather than paying for fuel, its incinerator is a money-maker. Lachell declined to say how much the company earns.

But the Times Union estimates that Norlite could have been paid nearly $180 million since 2000. That figure is based on average incineration rates in a 1998 report by the Army Corps of Engineers, adjusted for inflation to about $700 a ton, combined with Norlite's waste figures from EPA reports.

Each of Norlite's kilns measure about 180 feet long and 10 feet in diameter, and weigh roughly 500 tons. Shale from a on-site quarry is fed in for a 45-minute super-heated tumble that causes gases in the rock to expand, turning it into a strong, lightweight construction base.

There is no equipment to measure pollution, other than carbon monoxide, as it leaves the stacks. Instead, state pollution reports are based on a test burn done at the kilns every five years, with the results applied to the amount and type of waste later fed into the kilns.

At Norlite, the last measurement of dioxin and other pollution from the plant happened in 2004, when the company did a test burn as a requirement for renewal of its DEC air pollution permit.

The first two burns were failures because of high levels of dioxins and furans, another dangerous chemical related to chlorine. Norlite suceeded on its third burn and got its permit, which expired in June 2007. It is currently under DEC review for renewal.

None of the 2004 tests incorporated the unstable fuel or carbon monoxide problems occurring at the kilns, and that prompted this summer's state citation.

Lachell said the kilns burn so hot that dangerous waste is essentially destroyed; he said it was not possible to run a test burn to reflect unstable hazardous waste.

Such unstable fuel episodes were not a problem, Lachell added, because most of them "happened so fast."

A Times Union analysis of Norlite records from February 2007 through this April found more than 1,300 reports of unstable fuel episodes — unrelated to CO levels — that lasted at least a minute; about a quarter of those lasted 10 minutes or more. Added up, those episodes lasted a total of 177 hours, or more than a week.

Lachey said he disagrees with the DEC violations, which found Norlite's efforts at adjusting its mix of hazardous waste was "an inadequate means" of meeting federal pollution limits.

As the emissions problems were emerging, Norlite also ran afoul of EPA last year after investigators found the company had under-reported the amount of hazardous waste received from its customers to the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory. The inventory is used by the public to learn what waste a company is emitting.

Under an EPA settlement last June, Norlite paid a $60,000 fine for not providing "complete and correct" reports on 11 dangerous chemicals from 2000 through 2003 — a period in which a now-defunct Cohoes neighborhood group was urging the state to take a closer look.

When the company submitted new reports under the federal order, the reported quantity of chemicals jumped more than 450 percent, according to a Times Union investigation published in April.

Lachell blamed the EPA violation on the government's "lack of uniformity in reporting requirements."